“Now sleep, man. You’ll be needing all your strength and wits in the morning.”
Next morning they rode downstream until they found a village next to a vast empty Hindu temple, and in the village were small basket boats that resembled Welsh coracles and McCandless hired a half-dozen of these as ferries. The unsaddled horses were made to swim behind the boats. It was a perilous crossing, for the brown current snatched at the light vessels and whirled them downstream. The horses, white-eyed, swam desperately behind the reed boats that Sharpe noted had no caulking of any kind, but depended on skilful close weaving to keep the water out, and the tug of the horses’ leading reins strained the light wooden frames and stretched the weave so that the boats let in water alarmingly. Sharpe used his shako to bail out his coracle, but the boatmen just grinned at his futile efforts and dug their paddles in harder. Once a half-submerged tree almost speared Sharpe’s boat, and if the trunk had struck them the boat must surely have been tipped over, but the two boatmen skilfully spun the coracle away, let the tree pass, then paddled on.
It took half an hour to land and saddle the horses. Simone had shared a coracle with McCandless and the brief voyage had soaked the bottom half of her thin linen dress so that the damp weave clung to her legs. McCandless was embarrassed, and offered her a horse blanket for modesty’s sake, but Simone shook her head.
“Where do we go now, Colonel?” she asked.
“Towards Aurungabad, Ma’am,” McCandless said gruffly, keeping his eyes averted from her beguiling figure, ‘but doubtless we shall be intercepted long before we reach that city. You’ll be with your husband by tomorrow night, I don’t doubt.”
Sevajee’s men rode far ahead now, spread into a picquet line to give warning of any enemy. This land all belonged to the Rajah of Hyderabad, an ally of the British, but it was frontier land and the only friendly troops now north of the Godavery were the garrisons of Hyderabad’s isolated fortresses. The rest were all Mahrattas, though Sharpe saw no enemies that day. The only people he saw were peasants cleaning out the irrigation channels in their stubble fields or tending the huge brick kilns that smoked in the sunlight. The brick-workers were all women and children, greasy and sweaty, who gave the travellers scarcely a glance.
“It’s a hard life,” Simone said to Sharpe as they passed one half-built kiln where an overseer lazed under a woven canopy and shouted at the children to work faster.
“All life’s hard unless you’ve got money,” Sharpe said, grateful that Simone had at last broken her silence. They were riding a few paces behind the Colonel and kept their voices low so he could not hear them.
“Money and rank,” Simone said.
“Rank?” Sharpe asked.
“They’re usually the same thing,” Simone said.
“Colonels are richer than captains, are they not?” And captains are generally richer than sergeants, Sharpe thought, but he said nothing. Simone touched the pouch at her waist.
“I should give you back your diamonds.”
“Why?”
“Because…” she said, but then fell silent for a while.
“I do not want you to think.. .” she tried again, but the words would not come.
Sharpe smiled at her.
“Nothing happened, love,” he told her.
“That’s what you say to your husband. Nothing happened, and you found the diamonds on a dead body.”
“He will want me to give them to him. For his family.”
“Then don’t tell him.”
“He is saving money,” Simone explained, ‘so his family can live without work.”
“We all want that. Dream of life without work, we do. That’s why we all want to be officers.”
“And I think to myself,” she went on as if Sharpe had not spoken, ‘what shall I do? I cannot stay here in India. I must go to France. We are like ships, Sergeant, who look for a safe harbour.”
“And Pierre is safe?”
“He is safe,” Simone said bleakly, and Sharpe understood what she had been thinking for the last two days. He could offer her no security, while her husband could, and although she found Pierre’s world stultifying, she was terrified by the alternative. She had dared taste that alternative for one night, but now shied away from it.